Nobody likes to call any company customer services, we all know many companies provide you with delays and useless people to avoid you calling for any non important reason. Email support are replied with an automated email to their support FAQ or a phone number. In a few words, customer services are a weekly pain for the consumer.

Looks like we moving away from calling customer service and waiting on the message: “your call is important to us” or “all our customer service representatives are busy, yet we will answer as soon as we can”. Many users are looking for customer services in Twitter. Let’s be realistic, how many users have time to wait for 20 minutes on the phone to get a person that eventually will transfer you to somebody that might be able to help.

For the past 3 months my AT&T iPhone voicemail hasn’t been working, last time I called about this problem, nobody was able to help and it took me at least 30 minutes on the phone and rebooting iPhone or looking at useless settings. I rather go to the dentist than wasting my time again. Instead wouldn’t be easier to just tweet your problem and wait for “the right customer service” to contact you?

So I did just that, companies are listening more and more, we have seen good customers services from people at twitter. Companies should listen instead of keeping a phone line for you to call them. The days of waiting on the phone should be, at this time, a bad dream from the past.

If people are looking for business reasons to make twitter useful, I believe this one is without any doubt a great reason for Twitter to exist. Is the perfect platform for that, public messages that companies should reply and keep customers happy. At Twitter customer services cannot hide useless “representatives”, transfer you somewhere else or tell you that will be done and is not. They are in a public forum, where other consumers are listening as well for those resolutions.

Well the tweet to AT&T is there for them to listen, has worked with other companies, I’ll keep this post comments open and update it as more information comes until the resolution or complete failure.

Update: AT&T never contacted me about my problems with the voicemail on the iPhone, I contacted them this weekend to fix the issue. Of course took 2 different people to find the correct person to help me. International SMS messages still not working, another chance for AT&T to contact me on twitter.